One More Grey Cat
by Scarecrowqueen
Summary: The fairness of the world depends on your point of view. Puck, Kurt, and the fallout from Sectionals. First in the Monochrome Trilogy. Slash.


Disclaimer: Just playing in another's sandbox, guys.

* * *

You like to think that someday you'll look back on this with fondness; a burst of youthful exhilaration, maybe, the touch of the forbidden.

You've never been the type to lie to yourself, though. Maybe to everyone else (wool pulled carefully over impassive eyes,) but meeting your own eyes in the mirror has never failed to uncover all your little half-truths. (If there's one thing you've learned, is that self-awareness does not a brave man make.)

You know it too well to not recognize the feeling of shame and heartbreak.

* * *

You don't know when it started, exactly. Maybe the first time your hands hooked under his shoulders during that original dumpster toss. Maybe it was the day of sectionals; thrown off your game, Finn absent and seething, when the only relief of tension was flicking the perfect shell of his ear while all around you your team fell apart. Hell, maybe it was five minutes ago when he showed up for rehearsal almost-late and resignedly took the empty seat next to you. (The only one left, deliberately ignored by a roomful of people united against you.)

Maybe it's when you sit alone on the park down the road, on that one bench with the graffiti on it, strumming your guitar to sad, sad songs, and when you realize that he's standing there, you look up and your eyes meet.

"Hummel." You say, neutral.

"Noah." He's aiming for neutral, but you hear the condescension anyways. "You've been watching me." It's not really a question, and you don't deny it, although you don't tell him that sometimes, you just can't look away.

"You're not _gay_." He says, as much statement as accusation. You shrug, one shoulder more than the other.

"All cats look grey in the dark." You tell him, and it's as much a truth as anything. You're unsurprisingly sick of lies and bravado, still floundering for an even footing. (Tightrope walking without a safety net.) You will never admit that the edge in his eyes made you feel almost nervous.

* * *

It was Everything (with a capital E) that first time, that had you sneaking into his basement window on his invitation. (Quinn and Finn and the baby and the battlelines drawn across the school and your mother's disappointment and the never-ending feeling of emptylostscaredalone)

The first time is awkward, because you're not used to a body so similar to your own, because looking is different than touching and feeling and wanting, but you muddle through enough for both of you to come. You've barely felt that you've caught your breath when you're urged back into your clothes, back out the window like a dirty secret. (You suppose you are, aren't you. Always someone's dirty fucking secret)

It doesn't stop you from returning again, and again.

* * *

By the third time you've begun to understand how to make two boys fit together most easily. By the ninth time, you know most of his tells, the kinds of touches that make him sob, or sigh. By the fifteenth you feel like a goddamn expert slipping in and out of the window, nothing but a dark smudge in the night, and really being the secret lover (easy fuck) is not romantic, not at all. (Not when by daylight you are denied, ignored, nothing but someone's nightly shameful indulgence.)

(Kurt does not look at you directly in the daytime, and keeps the lights off at night.)

You wonder all the time who or what he's really seeing when he looks right through you. (And it hurts, because sometimes there's just so many things you want to do with him, for him, _to him,_ and not all of them good, because you are still a jealous, selfish bastard.)

(You pull your guitar into your lap and strum idly, just so your hands won't feel so empty, the wood body like a solid wall between you and everything you used to be a part of.)

* * *

His window stays locked for two straight weeks, and he's stopped even glancing in your direction, eyes not even going directly past you anymore. You've become a black hole in the world, and he's careful to avoid your pull, like failing to do so will be his very end.

You overhear him telling Mercedes about his new boyfriend, a nice young man from a rival high school, who's big into the musical theatre program there. You immediately hate this nameless, faceless boy who took your place, who took what had never really belonged to you anyways (_but should have!_)

You apologize to Finn again; you understand now better where he's coming from. (It doesn't help your cause and his eyes stay flat and unconvinced)

You don't show up for your afternoon classes, and the teachers never figure out who punched out the third mirror in the boy's first floor south bathroom. (But your little sister eyes your bloody knuckles for days after, even though she doesn't ask.)

* * *

You're reasonably sure that this whole thing between you both; this sidetrip from normalcy, must have been some form of karmic retribution. Because only a lifetime of bad karma like yours could account for any of this, really, and eventually everyone gets what they deserve. It's kind of absurd, in its own twisted, fucked-up way. (Because nothing feels right anymore, like your skin's to small for everything new that's grown inside you; a monster you're sure is withered and ugly.)

You still don't know how it's possible that you could _feel so much_ for someone, (although you don't have a name for what this feeling is) and have them feel nothing in return. (Not even shame, anger, disgust. You could live with those, but this is like you've turned to glass and aren't visible except for what lies beyond you.)

From across the street you watch, knowing someone else could be sneaking into that basement window tonight. (The ugly thing inside you grows like a living sickness.) You swallow it down and walk away, the only real recourse left. (In earlier days you may have egged the house on principle; today you are not that person, today you just quietly bleed inside where it doesn't show)

Your dark clothes turn you into a shapeless form in the deepening shadows; just another grey cat in the dark.

* * *

Story continued with Kurt's POV in "I See Nothing but Black"


End file.
